3 - She'erith Hapleitah enters the international arena: July–October 1945

Summary

As the Allied armies uncovered the hastily abandoned concentration camps, the shocking truth about the murder of the Jews of Europe was, for the first time, widely publicized. Newspaper reports and photographs, newsreels, soldiers writing home and chaplains informing Jewish organizations of what they had found quickly supplanted the vague images and protective disbelief which had lent wartime reports an air of unreality. The horror and anger these reports engendered were compounded by descriptions of the hostility and ill-treatment that survivors continued to encounter after their liberation. As Chaplain Samson M. Goldstein reported to the American Jewish Welfare Board already in April 1945: “Some Jews are being found but they are completely destitute. So are the other freed prisoners. But in the case of the Jews the mental attitude is worse. The war has not done away with the antisemitic feeling among antisemites. The faster these Jews can be evacuated from here the better they will be.” Soldiers wrote of the harsh conditions that those who barely remained alive had to contend with, especially if they originally come from Axis countries:

Instead of preserving the few Jewish survivors and taking care of their needs better … because they represent the remnants of the millions who have been murdered … these poor people are put in the category of the German civilians who have been their worst enemies. The victims of Nazism are made to suffer all the “inconveniences” – to put it mildly – meant for the reeducation of the Germans.